


The Good Thing About This Cast Is I Can Still Hold A Knife

by VeggiesforPresident (luridCavum)



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Character Study, Gen, Tattoos, stick-and-poke tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 21:14:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18948781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luridCavum/pseuds/VeggiesforPresident
Summary: Mac, over the years, gives himself tattoos.





	The Good Thing About This Cast Is I Can Still Hold A Knife

Ronald McDonald is sixteen, sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor, and he’s in love. In front of him, sitting on the closed toilet seat is Davie, the weed man from two high schools over, who’s stabbing himself in the leg with a needle.  Davie wipes the spot off, dips the needle in the inkwell, stabs, wipes, repeats. The tattoo—Ronnie is pretty sure it’s a tooth, but from this angle it could be a some kind of ghost— starts to take shape on Davie’s leg. Davie’s thigh is muscular, with coarse, dark hair everywhere except the patch Davie’s currently tattooing. He has dozens of other tattoos, all the same scratchy, self-poked style: another tooth, a match, some choice curse words, a girl’s name, so on and so on. Ronnie stares.

“You want one, Ronnie?” Davie asks, grinning. He has a gap in his two front teeth.

Ronnie has to speak up to be heard over the music, “Sure,” he says.

“Aight,” Davie says, “Start thinkin’, and once I’m done, I’ll have a go at you.”

Ronnie swallows. “What’s it gonna cost?” He asks. That’s how these things usually go: Ronnie gets what he wants, and Davie gets a six-pack, or a date with Dennis’ current girlfriend, or free weed, or whatever.

But Davie just curls his lip between his teeth and shrugs, “Nothin’.”

Ronnie blinks, “What?”

“Nah,” Davie says, “You’re tight, dude. We’ll just hang some time.”

Later, Ronnie will blame the way his heart suddenly starts to pound as the alcohol, or how bright the bathroom lights are, or the dehydration. Whichever one sounds best in the wake of a wicked hangover.  But right now, he knows it’s the way Davie’s eyes are green-green- _green_ , and the way he smiles at Ronnie, crooked and real.

“Thanks, bro.”

“No problem.”

They retreat into silence while Davie finishes himself up. Ronnie thinks up twenty-four shitty ideas by the time Davie is putting a huge bandaid over his own thigh. Davie smooths the bandaid out, and pats a spot in front of the toilet for Ronnie.

“Fuck, man,” Ronnie says, “How do you know what you want?”

“On a tattoo?” Davie asks. He shrugs, “It just comes to me.”

“Shit,” Ronnie says.

Davie laughs, his breath tickling the back of Ronnie’s neck.

“S’alright, Ronnie,” Davie says, “You’ll thinka somethin’.”

Oh. _Oh._

“That’s it.”

“What?”

“Ronnie. I want ‘Ronnie’ tattooed on me.”

“Your… your name?”

“Yeah? Fuck you, man, just do it.”

Davie pauses, but after a second he shrugs, “Sure, dude. Where?”

Ronnie climbs to his knees, tugs his pants down a bit and hikes up his shirt, “Here.” He points to the middle of his hip, tries to ignore the thump-thump of his heart against his ribs.

Davie touches the spot, his fingers sweat-sticky, “Here?”

“Yeah,” Ronnie breathes.

“Alright, man,” Davie says, and gets to work.

It stings, like getting a million tiny shots. A regular tattoo wouldn’t be like this, Ronnie thinks distantly, it’d be much quicker, cleaner. But then Ronnie wouldn’t feel Davie’s beer-foul breath on his back, wouldn’t have Davie’s deft fingers stretching and prodding his skin in time with the music pounding through the door.

After the first letter, or what Ronnie thinks is the first letter, he becomes numb to it. Davie sticks, pokes, wipes, repeats. Ronnie’s mind turns to other things; the 7/11 opening down the street, or whether the stray cat behind the MacIntyre’s house had its kittens yet. Ronnie wonders if his tattoo’ll get infected. Or if this counts as a sin. When he asks Davie, Davie shrugs and says probably not.

Davie finishes a handful of minutes later. Ronnie is considerably soberer now, and his hip is on fire. Davie gives the spot a final poke and pushes Ronnie gently away.

“Looks good, dude,” he says. Ronnie stands, his legs needling into wakefulness, and shuffles over to the mirror. Sure enough, _RONNIE_ is poked into his hip, in a slanted but pretty clean line. He touches the spot gingerly.

“Fuck,” Ronnie hisses.

“Don’t touch it, dude?” Davie says, “It’s a tattoo. Shit hurts.”

“I know that,” Ronnie says defensively.

“Sure you do,” Davie says, rolling his eyes.

“I do!”

“Sure,” Davie says again, but after a beat, he grins. “C’mere.”

Ronnie moves so he’s standing between Davie’s thighs.

Davie hands him a big bandaid. “You’ll wanna wash it,” Davie says, his voice is low despite the loud music, “Like, once a day. And don’t scratch when it starts to itch.”

Ronnie’s heart leaps to his throat, and he moves forward a little to take the bandaid. Davie grins and Ronnie sees the gap in his teeth again.

“Don’t scratch,” Ronnie echoes, “Right.”

Silence descends between them, crackling and thick with something Ronnie doesn’t recognize.

“Right,” Davie says, after a minute where neither of them move.

Ronnie clears his throat, and looks down at his hip for real, “This is so fucking sweet,” Ronnie says.

“Fuck yeah it is,” Davie grins. “Hey, whatdya say we smoke a bowl?”

“Smoking the product, man?” Ronnie asks, “Fuck yeah, I like your style.”

They smoke a few bowls in the cramped bathroom with sweating walls, plastering the wallpaper with weed stank, until Ronnie forgets all about his stinging hip, and the way Davie makes his heart pound.

__________

 

Ronnie washes his tattoo diligently for the first week, applying and reapplying bandages every night before bed. During the day, he steals glances at his hip every chance he gets: in the bathroom, before class, whenever he has a spare moment and no one else is around. He gets a thrill every time the band of his jeans rubs against it the wrong way, sending a shock of pain up his side.

He does research in his spare time, too; he texts Davie a dozen questions: can you use different colored inks, what size needle is best, how deep should you poke it, and so on, and so on. Davie answers every one, and invites Ronnie to smoke with him on Fridays. Ronnie, delighted, accepts.

After about a month, Ronnie has swiped enough stuff from the art supply store that he feels ready to do a tattoo of his own. He really wants to. His notebooks are slowly filling with doodles: a skull that would look good above his knee, the logo from one of Charlie’s t-shirts that could go on his thigh, the dumpster graffiti that could sit above his other hip. But nothing clicks, not like it did with Davie’s weed breath on his neck.

It’s a cold Friday afternoon when it happens. Ronnie’s knuckles have barely stopped bleeding by the time he bursts through the front door. He feels fucking great, like he’s King of the whole fucking neighborhood. He can’t fucking believe it. He floats upstairs, humming something from Metallica, while the tooth-breaking _thwack_ of his foot hitting Adriano’s stupid face plays on a loop in his head.

He doesn’t really process what he’s doing until he’s halfway through: pulling the shoebox out from under his bed, plugging in his electric razor and shaving a square of hair off his thigh. When Ronnie comes to, though, it just makes sense. Adriano had looked so confused, kneeling on the blacktop, staring at the blood dripping into his hands. When it dawned on him that it was _Ronnie_ who did it; that it had been _Ronnie the_ _Rat_ who had kicked his tooth out, well, the look on his face was something worth preserving.

And preserve it Ronnie will.

After thinking about it for three seconds, Ronnie decides he doesn’t want Adriano’s face tattooed on him for the rest of his life. Plus, he’s not sure his art skills are up to the task. But there has to be something else that can hold this high.

Hmm…

He thinks for a few minutes, until it hits him like—well, like a foot to the face.

It’s not as easy as Davie makes it look. There are a lot of weird turns in a tooth, ridges where Ronnie thinks it should be smooth. Ronnie even pulls an old science textbook out from where it’s propping up one corner of his bed to use as a reference. The pages are stained and half of them are missing or burnt, but Ronnie manages to find a page with an x-ray of a skull that’s pretty well-preserved. His tooth tattoo is wobbly as fuck, but Ronnie keeps sticking and poking and going over lines until they look right, so it turns out okay. He even uses some red ink at the bottom of the tooth: a splattering of Adriano’s blood.

When it’s done, Ronnie grins ear-to-ear. A tooth with a splotch of blood dripping down now sits on his thigh. He cleans up his new tattoo and puts a big band-aid over it. It’s sick as hell. Ronnie picks up his phone to send a picture to Charlie, or Schmitty, but he pauses. He _knows_ Charlie will rave about the fight whenever he gets here, and Schmitty will remind him about it the next time Adriano tries to corner him in the bathroom. But the tattoo… Ronnie isn’t so sure. Charlie would just nod at him, in the nervous way he does when someone says something Charlie doesn’t wanna admit he doesn’t understand. And Schmitty would call him a girl, or an idiot. Which is fine, ‘cause Ronnie can’t explain himself why he does it, other than _it just feels right_.

So Ronnie pockets his phone. A little while later, Charlie shows up and raves at him. Ronnie beams. The rest of the night is normal: shotgunning beer and watching some action movies. But every so often Ronnie will move or twist in the wrong way, and his thigh will sting, reminding him of what’s hidden underneath; every time, Ronnie grins.

__________

 

It’s a year and a half before Ronnie finds inspiration again. The itch to stich something into his skin doesn’t fade, but like last time, none of his ideas really stick.

Things change. Dooley stops hanging out with the gang, only stopping in during the occasional movie night, or late to a party, and then not at all. Ronnie’s kinda pissed, but not enough to do anything about it. Dennis’ annoying bird sister joins the group. They get drunk, they get high, they piss in public.  Despite all that, somehow, they all get their shit together enough to walk across a stage in goofy, sweaty gowns and get “not as big failures as we thought you were” diplomas.

They don’t actually walk across the stage, of fucking course not. Fuck that bureaucratic shit. Instead, in their caps and gowns that are dissolving in the rain like tissue paper, the gang sneaks to the McDonalds down the street. All of them are variously sticky and more than a little drunk.

 “I heard they put rat meat in the burgers,” Charlie says, sucking the juice off his palm.

“That’s ridiculous,” Dennis says, plucking a fry between his first two fingers, “It’s just chicken scraps.”

“No, dude, it’s the weird grey bits you cut off steak,” Ronnie says.

“You guys are insane; it’s horse meat,” Dee says.

This devolves into an argument. Ronnie yells for a minute about how the texture is the same as the day-old steaks from the Russian deli down the street, but he loses interest as soon as he hears himself say the word ‘mouth-feel’. Charlie keeps on the rat angle, and for all Ronnie realizes he cares, it could be rat meat he’s eating.

Charlie killed a rat the other night, actually. It had got into Ronnie’s room somehow, and tried to take a bite out of Poppins while they were sleeping. Ronnie had awoke to Poppins’ howls, and Charlie had acted fast enough to slam a shoe down on the rat. The vermin was frothing at the mouth, and it made some horrible noises, but Charlie kept pounding and pounding until it was dead.

Then, the rat was dead. It was weird and a little sad, Ronnie thought, looking at the boot-stamped rat on his bedroom floor. Some of its organs were spilling out. It reminded Ronnie of how he felt sometimes after Adriano got done with him: overexposed, leaking, pitiful.

Huh.

“Guys,” Ronnie interrupts, “Guys. Guess what I just realized.”

Dennis stops mid-sentence and stares at him, “What?”

Ronnie grins at him like he’s won the lottery, “Guys. Ronnie the rat is dead.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dennis asks.

Ronnie rolls his eyes, “Listen, guys. Like. I was Ronnie the Rat all through high school—”

“Yeah, cause you ratted on everyone.”

“Shut the hell up, bird. I was saying, I was Ronnie the rat, but I don’t have to be any more. I fuckin’ hated that name anyway.”

“So you’re gonna stop snitching?”

“Fuck no. You just can’t call me a rat any more.”

“Uh. I guess?”

“Okay, dude.”

“So you want us to call you something else…?”

“What? No,” Ronnie huffs, “That’s not the point, you guys aren’t listening—”

“Whatever, Mickey.”

“Mi— I’m not a fucking mouse.”

“So, what? You want us to call you Mac? Since you’re always shoveling Big Macs into that great big maw of yours.”

“Well, fuck you, first of all.”

“Whatever, Mac. Now as I was saying, the English were really the ones who…”

Whatever is right. Ronnie – No, _Mac,_ tunes Dennis out.

That’s what he gets for trying to explain himself to them. Whatever. The point is, he doesn’t have to be Ronnie the Rat ever again. Four years of wedgies, shitty dates, bad highs are over. He doesn’t have to huff glue under the bleachers with Charlie between class, or rat on popular bitches when they do the same. Ronnie the Rat is dead. He can just be… Mac, he guesses. He can be Mac; whoever the hell that is.

 

Mac gets home way late, after a sixer and as many rounds of karaoke in the Reynold’s basement. Mom is passed out in the living room, snoring loudly. Mac creeps upstairs to the bathroom, although he doesn’t need to be real quiet, since the neighbors have some weird electro-club music thumping through the shared wall. Mac digs his tattoo kit from under his bed and brings it into the bathroom.

The rat is dead, long live the king. No, wait, he’s a McDonald’s man, not a fucking Burger King.

Fuck it, whatever.

The rat is dead, long live Mac.

He rolls up his sleeve.

It’s awkward as hell, he soon discovers, sketching and poking with only one hand. Mac practices by re-poking over his old tattoos, freshening them up, before he gets to work. He manages to finagle resting his elbow on the back of the toilet seat and holding the inkpot between his knees. It’s slow work, and poking takes at least twice as long as Adriano’s tooth did. But he has the thump-thump of his neighbor’s weird music to keep him company, and the pleasant buzz at the back of his mouth. He tattoos.

When he’s finished, Mac has a dead rat lying belly-up on his bicep, complete with big X’s for eyes. He cleans his arm with the last inch of soap, goes to his room, and passes out on his bed.

__________

 

It happens periodically over the next few years. A skull there, a tooth here. After a surprisingly sober night on the roof with Charlie, Dennis, and Schmitty, Mac stabs a four-pointed star into his knee. He pokes his first apartment key into the soft part of his calf. It feels… good. As often as he browns out – which is more and more as the years go on – and as loud as his diatribes are about how much everything sucks forever, it feels good to have something to remember it all by.

He never tells anyone at first. Dennis must know, Mac wagers, seeing as they’ve lived together for years in a cramped apartment. The women he sleeps with know; at least, the ones who stay ‘til morning light, who are few and far between. But none of them ever say anything about it.

As the years go on, Mac cares less about keeping it a secret; they’ve all seen his rat at one point or another, what with his penchant for sleeveless shirts. If Charlie gets a glimpse of a tooth or two while they’re high on the couch, it’s no big deal. If, while he’s wrestling away from Frank’s murderous grasp because Frank decided Mac owes him money, Dee gets a noseful of the stars on Mac’s knees, so be it.

So, Mac shouldn’t really be surprised when one day, Dennis glances at him over his cereal, and asks, “What the fuck is that?”

“What the fuck is what?”

“That,” Dennis points with his bowl.

Mac looks down. Oh yeah. His sweatpants are falling down, so _Ronnie_ is on display to anyone who might care to see. Mac shrugs, “Tattoo.”

“Why does it look so shitty?”

“Davie did it back in high school.”

“Davie? Who the hell is Davie?”

“Uh, the guy I hang out with on Fridays? Weed man from Dunbar High. I hang out with him like, every week, dude.”

“ _That’s_ where you go on Fridays? We all thought you just got too high and passed out in the dump.”

“The fuck? No, me and Davie are like, bros, man.”

“Oh. Okay. I don’t give a shit.” Dennis goes back to his breakfast.

And that was that, for a while.

The next time someone says something, it’s Dee, of all people. They’re wine drunk on her couch, and somehow she’s talked him into watching some Disney movie with her. Something about her mom never letting her watch it as a kid, lest it give her the idea she was gonna go somewhere in her life.

It’s summer, and heat is rolling in through every crack in the walls.

Dee laughs and spills half her glass onto Mac’s shorts.

“What the hell, Dee?” Mac yells.

“Shit,” Dee says. She starts wiping his thigh with her hands, which does little more than rub the wine deeper into it.

Mac shoves her off, “You stupid bird.” He says, and goes to find a towel.

“Wait,” Dee slurs. Mac waits, but instead of saying something helpful, Dee just asks, “Why’s your stars got knee on it?”

“What?”

Dee screws up her face as if thinking is hard for her, “Why’s your… knee got stars on it?”

Mac blinks. His knee has three stars on it now, the biggest one in the middle and two smaller ones by its side. The smallest one Mac added just last week.

Mac sighs, “It’s a tattoo, dumb shit, you don’t know what those are?”

“Of course I know what tattoos are, stupid,” Dee says, wrinkling her nose.

“I’m not stupid!”

“Yeah you are, stupid!”

“You’re stupid!”

“Stupid!”

“Stupid!”

They go back and forth until they get bored, which happens quickly. Mac comes back to the couch with a towel, although by now the wine has all but dried up.

“Seriously, what is it? You’re so weird about your tattoos,” Dee says when Mac comes back.

Maybe it’s the wine, or the muggy summer breeze, or some divine intervention, but instead of shouting, Mac decides to answers her, “I dunno. I do most of ‘em myself, and I just didn’t think you guys’d understand.”

Dee laughs, nasally, “Oh you poor asshole.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“You first. What, like we wouldn’t understand you poking a bunch of holes in your knee?”

“No,” Mac says, “Like, why I did them. Nevermind, fuck off.”

Dee sits up, gives him a pout that’s almost sincere, “C’mon, I just wanna know.”

Mac looks at her. She smiles a thin smile.

“Fine.” He pulls his shorts up to give Dee a better look, “This big one’s from a boy’s night a few years ago. Back when Schmitty was part of the gang. We all lay on the roof and, like, talked, or whatever.” Mac flushes, “We didn’t argue or anything the whole night. I don’t know, it was a good time. I wanted to remember it.”

Dee looks thoughtful, “Well, that’s not totally idiotic I guess. What about the other ones?

“The same thing, basically. This little one was from when me and Charlie faked our deaths.”

“Of fucking course it is.”

“And this tiny one is from last week, when we hit Cricket in the head by dropping cans off the roof.”

Dee barks out a hyena laugh, “Oh yeah! He was so mad.”

Mac laughs too, remembering Cricket covered in warm beer and squinting up with his good eye, “And he said he’d forgive you if you slept with him!”

Dee laughs so hard she chokes, “I wouldn’t give him a handy if I was wearing a hazmat suit and had cactuses for fingers.”

“I think it’s cacti.”

“What, did you go to college now, you bitch?”

"I could have if I wanted to.”

“Yeah right.”

“Whatever. You know who never went to college? Cricket.”

“Fuck nah.”

They make fun of Cricket for a little while, choke-laughing and spilling half the new bottle of wine. When the movie credits roll, Dee silently puts in another DVD. While the opening logo plays, Mac starts mentally sketching tattoos.

__________

Years go by. Mac gets into fights. He comes out. He gets drunk. He gives himself tattoos.

He loves all his tattoos, but some he finds he likes more than others: Charlie’s rat bashing stick, standing near the dead Ronnie rat on his bicep, flowers he saw growing defiantly through the sidewalk cracks in front of his and Dennis’s apartment, a scrawny crow, a cross which he later changes into two overlapping Mars symbols, and a cross he doesn’t change at all.

One day Mac is forty-one, and catches his eye in the mirror. Mac’s in his underwear, and if he stands on his toes he can see just about every tattoo he’s given himself in his reflection. All the memories stand, glowing on his skin. He might be white trash – he’s copped to that over the last few months. He’s copped to a lot of things lately –  But he’s white trash that he’s proud of. His whole story poked into his skin. All the weird bits, the strange, the dangerous, the hilarious. All there for him to see, to remember, to know.

He looks pretty damn good, if he says so himself.


End file.
